The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (review) (original) (raw)
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For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form. http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/ImhoofTotal
The Creative Destruction of the Total Work of Art: from Hegel to Wagner and Beyond
Ruhl (et al.; ed.): The Death and Life of the total work of art: Henry Van De Velde And The Legacy Of A Modern Concept, 2014
This paper shows how the concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (total or universal work of art), which originated as 'Artwork of the Future' in Richard Wagner's 'Zurich Writings', is rooted in Wagner's reading of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit', particularly of the section on 'Das geistige Kunstwerk' (The Spiritual Work of Art). Wagner's conceptions of a 'Kunstwerk der Zukunft' and a universal 'Kunstgenossenschaft' must be interpreted as a failed attempt to provide a solution for the negative deadlock of modernity and thus an alternative to today's total work of art: capitalism.
Reference, Autonomy and Nationalism in Early German Romantic Art
Expositions, 2011
In the early nineteenth century the Enlightenment's ideal of the autonomous artwork still held sway over mainstream artistic expression, and it was particularly influential in the aesthetics of nineteenth century music (Dalhaus 1989a, 6; Chua 1999). This ideal of autonomy was perhaps first formulated by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (2005 [1790]), in which the artwork was characterized by its separation and independence from other pursuits: it is the idea that "what is essential to art is its radical separation from other kinds of truth, by virtue of its irreducibility to being judged in terms of anything but itself" (Bowie 1996). This trait, which has since been most commonly cited in discussions of "absolute" instrumental music, also applied to dramatic music of the era. Indeed, just as the texted works of the other arts (poetry, literature, drama etc.) were expected to be autonomous, so were many of those musical genres which included sung text. Further, this expectation included an ideal for nested autonomy in which the individual numbers of a work were also expected to maintain their own independence. The Number Opera from the eighteenth century, for example, with its requirement that each individual number have the ability to be "readily be detached from the whole," is a manifestation of this ideal (Tyrrell and Sadie 2001). This requirement had several direct effects on the music and its performance including the tendency for each number to begin and end in the same key as well as the frequent performance of individual numbers in concert and recital. 1 However, in the same period, German artists also began to incorporate extrinsic meaning into their works. That is, they began to incorporate meaning of a historical or symbolic nature that dealt with issues extending beyond the borders of the individual work. 2 Proponents of the use of extrinsic meaning looked to art to communicate solutions to the important philosophical and theological questions of the era. This, obviously, created a tension with the ideal of the autonomous work. As Andrew Bowie has described the tension, [It rested] between the desire for a "new mythology" and the idea of the autonomy of the aesthetic work. The "new mythology" […] would sensuously present ideas of reason in order to communicate the advances brought about by autonomous subjectivity to all levels of society. In contrast, the idea of superiority of the autonomous work of art over science and philosophy relies upon the conviction that the highest principle of philosophy is unrepresentable and must therefore be preserved from being used as a means for scientific and political ends. (Bowie 2003, 28
«Contemporary Modernisms». International Conference, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 2023
«Contemporary Modernisms». International Conference, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 2023, 2023
«Contemporary Modernisms». International Conference, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 2023. Title of my intervention: "The Iridescent Response to the Abyss. For a Modernist Ontology of the Image, both 'Painterly' and 'Rhythmic': Heinrich Wöfflin, Clement Greenberg, Henri Maldiney".
This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition—Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno—attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. The aesthetic speculations of these thinkers, I argue, provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of “aesthetic agency”— art’s capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. The book has two interrelated aims. First, it provides new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in both Anglo-American and German scholarship. Second, it attempts to demonstrate that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts.
Romanticism as Modernism: Richard Wagner’s “Artwork of the Future”
Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, 2020
This chapter argues for German Romanticism's preparatory and anticipatory relation to modernism by drawing on the works of the composer, writer and theater practitioner, Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Section 1 addresses the special status of music, especially Austro-German music, in European Romanticism. Section 2 places Romanticism in general and musical Romanticism in particular into the wider context of the early modern debate about the respective merits and demerits of ancient and modern art and culture. Section 3 introduces Wagner as an innovative theoretician and practitioner of Romantic-era music theater. Section 4 presents Wagner's main operatic works as manifestations of a modernism in romantic guise. Throughout the focus is on Wagner's critical reception of ancient, classical theater and modern, romantic opera. In methodological terms, the chapter seeks to provide a comparative and contrastive morphology of Romanticism in order to exhibit the latter's affinities with modern art in general and with modern music theater in particular.